Fun Food Saturday: Silly Tacos

Have you heard all of the buzz about spaghetti tacos? Yeah, so did we. Honestly, we didn’t think that much about it at first but we’ve been slowly discovering that the New York Times is on to something – it’s a huge deal in the pre-tween food world. After we made a note of it in a story last week, Chef Joe, our culinary sounding board and the arbiter of all that is cool and delicious, mentioned that he made it for his kids and they ate every bite. Now Chef Joe is making them? Maybe we’ve been missing something.

So we grudgingly went out and bought taco shells (Mexican food snob note: we have one of the best tortilla bakeries in the country right near our house and we never buy taco shells – we weren’t even sure where to find them at the store) with the thought that we could try them, but we’d have to ramp it up a little bit with something more original. The result? From the top: spaghetti tacos, mashed potato tacos, broccoli tacos (taccoli), and macaroni and cheese tacos.

The first one our littlest went for (before the photo shoot was even over) was the macaroni and cheese taco, and apparently that was good enough to eat standing up. The spaghetti taco was good enough, and the taccoli was decent, but the real surprise was the mashed potato taco. Something about the combination of the crunchy shell and the creamy interior was just perfect. If we had tossed a few cooked vegetables in there it would have tasted like a potato samosa.

After dinner we had a few taco shells left over so we filled them each with a scoop of ice cream. Apparently that went over pretty well too, because none of the dessert plates had so much as a crumb left on them. Our six-year-old came up with an idea to bake a batch of chocolate cookies and then stick them in a taco shell just when they come out of the oven and are still soft. Next time, kid, next time…